With my roommates out of town and social engagements cancelled, and Los Angeles basically melting to the point where I needed to huddle up in the room with the air conditioner, I've been watching a lot of stuff.
As I've said many times on this blog, I was raised on Star Trek (TNG to be specific). But when a new series, Star Trek Discovery, came out, it was on a streaming platform that I didn't have access to. Recently, I have gotten access to it, but I also heard various disappointing things about the show, so I was a bit wary of trying it out.
Well, in the past 24 hours I've watched almost all of season 1.
It is certainly true that, structurally, this is very different from your typical Star Trek. This feels very much like a modern, serialized story (though admittedly, the season really switches gears I want to say ten episodes in).
My sense is that, judging the show on its own merits, it's pretty good. But it lacks a lot of the hallmarks that we tend to associate with the franchise. For one, there is a very clear main character: Michael Burnham. We don't even see the eponymous starship until episode three - instead, we get a sort of two-part prologue that shows how this model officer became the pariah of the Federation - more or less because she took actions that led to the Klingon/Federation War that the original series is dealing with the aftermath of.
(As a kid who grew up with Worf, I remember being surprised that the Klingons were villains in the original Trek - though of course in Next Gen the culture is clearly decadent and broken).
There are quibbles I have with the show - for one, after her actions, Michael is sentenced to a life term. In past series we've seen the Federation's penal system to be fairly enlightened, and I would think that just about any offense has a possibility of rehabilitation and parole (granted, this is set in the 23rd century, which might not be quite as evolved as the 24th).
The other thing that is rather jarring is the quite profound visual redesign of the Klingons. I'm sure a lot of original series fans were shocked when their look was overhauled in Star Trek III: The Return of Spock. This redesign feels extreme, though, and also strange in how it replaces the famously great hair that Next Gen Klingons have with universal baldness. There is one possible reason for their redesign that might have to do with spoilers for later in the season, but I do kind of wish that they were a little closer to the TNG version.
There are a couple of episodes that introduce fun, episode-specific sci fi concepts to play through - one episode features a time loop (not something that Trek hasn't done before, of course, but this one plays into the growing relationship between two of its central characters). Another introduces a world where all of its life has formed a collective consciousness.
Indeed, I remember when rewatching some of Next Gen that some of the most beloved episodes that were stand-alones would have to be incorporated into an ongoing narrative, and this show very clearly does that.
In a sense, then, it makes this play out like extra-length episodes - its arcs being its episodes.
I think perhaps I have less reason to be frustrated with the series' departure from the typical Star Trek formula because I've started watching in a period where Strange New Worlds and even Lower Decks have given us a much more classic approach.
I will say that I don't really get the desire to keep kicking things back to the 23rd Century. Maybe I'm just a generational chauvinist, but after a combined 21 seasons of 24th Century shows, to me that is, in fact, the "default" Trek time period. Obviously we've got Picard now, as well as Lower Decks, so it's not as if there's no representation there. But I kind of wish that we'd have a forward-looking 24th Century show - Picard seems built around call-backs and nostalgia, and Lower Decks is too (though at least in that case we have new characters as our focus - it's just that Lower Decks is basically built to make an entertaining show out of "hey, we're all giant Star Trek nerds here, right?")
I'll be eager to see how the show develops, and how it concludes the first season - which at the point I'm at has profoundly changed gears and is actually managing to use an element of Star Trek's lore that I've almost always found tedious in a way that I think is actually dramatically interesting.
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